“I’m a lousy prophet,” he tells his students, “but I do predict that we will all live to see a resurgence in quality journalism that employers pay good money to produce and readers pay good money to read/view, only we’ll be working for smaller audiences who have been rediscovered by a whole new version of what we now call ‘advertisers.'”

Stuever notes that veteran journalists often say there’s never been a more exciting time to be entering the journalism field. “We say that because we honestly do see some potential opportunities that we never had. Some of us recall how many times we heard that our journalism dreams were ‘at least 10 years of hard news experience’ out of our reach, which is the last thing you want to hear as an eager 22-year-old.

“To us (almost) old farts, the new media platforms are exciting, so long as you can set aside the small matter of a paycheck. So much bullshit has been done away with. It feels like opportunity.”

But we’re also lying, too. It was never easy to get a job at a newspaper, but they were also pretty freakin’ great places to work. Back then (whenever — the ’70s, the ’80s, the ’90s; five years ago) was also an exciting time to be entering the field. We had a blast.

And you will too. It’s a different sort of blast. Life is long and so are careers. Stop waiting for the renaissance to work itself out — I’ve already told you that I don’t think that even our grandchildren will figure out the perfect business model for media. Shouldn’t it take at least a century for us to completely dismantle and reinvent six centuries of the printed word? So hang on and fight on.

“Uhhh…if memory serves, history has taught us that the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred on December 7th, 1941…NOT December 1st as the article states….,” says the first comment below this story on the Columbus (GA) Ledger-Enquirer website.